A Conversation on Scott's post

I recently had an opportunity to share my thoughts on some of the cultural aspects of India from my perspective on Scott's post about Joy Christian's attempts at falsifying Bell's-Inequality theorem.

Below I post some of my comments and Scott's on that post since I wanted a record for myself and a few readers of my blog.

Me:

First, I am so happy to see Scott’s recent and a bit more frequent posts in general! Congratulations again Scott on your recent award and your really inspiring speech.

I didn’t know about Joy Christian before, but I was googling him after these posts and based on one pic I am guessing he is from Indian descent.

Assuming that is right and that this kind of work is mainly rooted in one’s PSYCHOLOGY, I want to share the following comments.

Besides sounding crackpot I feel people like these can potentially do a bigger damage of aspiring younger Indian generations in completely bad directions.

I was recently reading “Great Moments in Mathematics before 1650″ and found out that Hindu mathematics remained empirical for long long after the Greeks’ transitioned to deduction based methods. That was a real aha moment for me in understanding my significant lack of resonance with the culture I descended from.

People like these need to be exposed more often so my people can realize the lackluster of the Indian ethos. Essentially all the successful individual Indians are basically due to a strong interaction-affect with the Western culture or those who “blocked” the local affects.

I know this is completely irrelevant in terms of Bell’s inequality etc. but I wanted to use Scott’s superb blog-platform to reach Indian readers.

I hope there is realization that all the relevant outcome measures of the Indian system are defined by the West. It’s simple, they have experienced many many wars in the recent history and learnt their lessons the hard way and we all live on the same planet. Stop confusing the younger generations with mystical behavior. Is it hard to realize it’s way easier to be mystical than be rigorous (easier to ask questions than to answer, easier to verify than prove). Hence if you want to set yourself apart in a relevant way, being mystical is definitely not the way.

Pardon any noise in my articulation. I would be glad to smooth my message if needed.

Scott:

I don’t actually know Joy’s national origin and don’t consider it relevant. I have to say, though, that while your intentions are good, I can’t agree with your thesis about the “lackluster [sic] of the Indian ethos,” in part because of the staggering number of counterexamples that spring immediately to mind (both Western-origin mystical crackpots, and brilliant Indian scientists, the latter including my PhD adviser). Incidentally, from what little I know about ancient Indian mathematics, it was nothing to sneeze at…

Me: 
I didn’t mean to offend any one who made serious technical contributions. I apologize sincerely you felt so. In fact your adviser Umesh Vazirani (and his brother), are some of the few who inspire me but I feel people like those are exceptions from India. For younger generations (in India) to benefit from such people we need to know much more than just their accomplishments – the key aspect being their embracing of Western philosophy at large.

I do not know the full reasons, but for example Sanjeev Arora for whom I have huge respect as well, was ranked 1st in IIT-Joint Entrance Exam. But he came to MIT for an undergraduate degree and didn’t study in India as an undergrad. Brilliant Indians mostly had Western experience in their lives that is hard to ignore.

I know we do have many IIT undegrads coming to the US and making significant contributions as grad students (e.g. Subhash Khot etc.) in the US but I feel that the fertility of the US system is a key factor in achieving that level of significance. I can hardly think of any brilliant Indian who achieved something by ignoring or taking radically different views from the Western philosophy. The few who did get world recognition were those under the British era.

At least from the book I was reading, there were not many great moments in Mathematics before 1650 from India except a few which were driven again “organically/empirically” rather than depending on raw-power-of-deduction. I believe the culture breeds a need for craving “more (mystical) validation” than just a with-standing-rigorous-deduction.

In terms of having crackpots from the West, yes most likely there are some but I feel that they are precisely the deviants (for various other serious) from the Western philosophy but are typically not bred by it.
In India there are many ongoing superficial adaptations from the West in the past 10 years or so (mainly due to financial interests and investments from the West) but again not at fundamental level. Again I didn’t mean to offend any great achievers from India. I felt to share this because this is the second time an Indian, in the recent past, in the media has shown up in controversy (the first being Vinay Deolalikar). I just wanted to highlight that achievements are defined and need to be validated by the West (with-stand Western scrutiny) otherwise they are not an achievements at all. I hope that clarifies my intentions.

P.S.: Now I have more evidence that he is from Indian origin based on this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2Sc0ZvNMe4

Blurring breadth and depth

After a gap of almost a year I felt like writing about my recent flashes on breadth and depth. But first I want to say (for my own record, which most of my blog actually is ;-) that the main reason for not blogging is being at the Waisman Center, surrounded by people who can articulate feelings in a much more rigorous way and make real living out of it. I felt silly to blog about design and analysis of living while the journal club here is named Design and Analysis where they talk real scientific ways to backup the articulation of hypotheses in feelings.

Okay now to breadth and depth. So my academic experience has been (1) wanting to go to a top-school in India and ending up in a local college, (2) wanting to do a PhD in theoretical computer science and ending up in applied fields like computer vision, robotics and for the past two years medical imaging in neuroscience. (2) is an outcome of (1) because my of limitations in math training. I always felt I didn't have enough depth in a mathematical field to be able to prove theorems for living. But I haven't been daunted enough to beat my love for the academic setting which is why I find creative ways of making myself useful in the research endeavors of this rich country. In this process one thing that happened to me is get exposed to a wide-variety of topics like protein folding, tomography, genetics, physical chemistry, etc. - Wisconsin's really good for such cross-fertilization for whatever reason.

Given this exposure that I needed to survive in academia and guided by perspectives from my dearest field (mainly due to Scott's articulations) I feel like I am able to blur the effect of lacking too much depth by having breadth in boosting my academic self-esteem. Breadth after all is a form of depth except for semantics. Being forced to cross the vocabulary barriers (e.g. terms in statistics & machine learning, "science" & engineering, hypotheses & models), I realize more and more that the underlying models of discovery, limitations of pursuit styles are all same and I can (and increasingly quickly) map the apparent "difficulties" of a research topic: whether it is due to vocabulary barriers or due to real hardness of the quests that challenge our potential bestowed on us by (very slow-paced) evolution. For me, articulating isomorphisms between fields is scientifically rewarding both in terms of intellectual satiation as well as (less surprisingly) career.

All these experiences only reinforce my belief that complexity theory is one of the most apt theories to be flourishing at this point of our evolution of our brain which is why Scott keeps reminding us of how forefront is the question of P vs. NP is in our pursuits. You should also checkout his amazing talks.

So basically the distinction between breadth and depth is blurry when focusing on higher-order bits in terms of giving gas for scientific pursuits and can safely say that breadth is the new depth that people should focus on for efficient fruition of many projects funded by US govt.

Time travel, aggressiveness and cleverness

Several times in the past during my philosogossips with my friends I used to mention that if not for British's ruling, traveling to India would be like time-travel into the past. Recently I was watching an episode on a popular-flavored time travel episode on History channel. The episode makes it reasonably clear that although science does not prevent time travel (something like we can not prove P not equal to NP), it's the amount of speed that's needed. For now nothing less than needing (exponential) energy seems possible for general purpose time travel although there seems to be a case of one person being 1/50th of a second in future because of his space travel.

And a few days ago while biking it just occurred to me time travel to the future might be thought of as already happening in our daily thoughts. See for time travel we need speeds close to the speed of light. Now, its easy to follow the thought experiment.

1) Thoughts can take "you" (make you experience) instantly across vast distances so lets say they have high speeds for experiential purposes.
2) Some people whose thoughts travel fast can "see the future".
3) They can "come back" and to let everyone see that future have to invest energy. In general they would require exponential amount, but thanks to collaborative efforts we "can pool" that required energy.
4) The time scale for everyone else to experience that future depends on how fast the pooling happens.
5) Coincidentally I can cite the example of Dr. King's vision for civil rights as the news on rallies in DC is running in the background on CNN.

So in a way if some one is aggressive enough to envision a future, clever enough to pool the resources by smartly tapping the collaborative instinct available abundantly in life, we can travel to the future. For e.g. if there wasn't such effort our grand-parental generation would not have seen the "future of such high technological advances". Whether time travel is good and wise (for survival) is a whole another topic! So far advances in civilization seem to be strong in saving lives, whether it's taking us on a sub-optimal time travel path instead of the "regular speed" time travel to the future, I don't know if it's possible to answer.

BTW everyone is forced to time travel in the forward direction, I am talking about the speed which distinguishes future from the present. Past I don't know much, although some cyclic experiences or deja vu's seem to be occurring sporadically :)

World view, social stock and self-esteem

I was traveling for about 5 weeks outside the US, one week in Stockholm and then four weeks in Hyderabad, India. Last year on my blog, I mentioned that traveling can be revealing and this time it was revealing but totally on a different (extremely personal level). While in India, I got married to my beautiful and very sweet wife, Anusha Rudravaram.

Heuristically speaking most people's perspectives are shaped based on their body chemistry (which is shaped both by long-term evolutionary forces and mid-term societal forces). World views are plausibly the most probable causal forces in shaping our civilization and it got good amount of attention of Scott Aaronson (my hero and inspirational guide on many levels).

Social stock of a person, like his/her financial stock, indicates how good and purposeful one can feel. After achieving certain levels of financial stocks in lives people tend to shift focus to self esteems in their respective circles of life be it scientists, military, academics, plumbers, construction workers etc. Mostly because gaining self-esteem provides newer challenges (feasible ones) and hence can be stimulating and satisfying! Marriage can certainly boost ones social stock especially arranged marriages. Arranged marriage system allows for many more marriages to happen giving chance to those whose self-esteems might otherwise prohibit them from getting married. As with any stock value (opinionated value) sustained growth of stock value actually takes balls, to be able to stick to ones original values and opinions (those before gaining the stock) and not get too distracted. Otherwise one can risk too much and might be a victim of bubble bursts.

There can be social stock only if there are overlaps in the world views of two people or two groups. It's actually proportional to the amount of commonalities among the world views of people one interacts with. Now depending on the level of commonality it might be easier or harder to find overlaps between different cultures. I once mentioned that it might be easier to date someone from a different culture (because one can focus on more instinctual level overlaps). But if we are focusing on cultural level overlaps it's obviously easier with ones own culture. Of course depending on a situation one might focus on different levels of overlaps and that can change world views, social stocks and self esteems. As Scott also says his talks (scroll to the bottom for Notes) represent what he thought at the time (which is robustly consistent though as his talks are based on more objective stuff :).

CAMINO-TRACKVIS 0.2

Thanks to Maxwell Collin's expertise in using nifticlib our new version of CAMINO-TRACKVIS becomes much easier to use. Key features in the new release:

1) One does not need to provide the volume and voxel dimensions.
2) The orientation information needed in Trackvis is automatically read from a NIFTI file so that overlaying FA/MD maps onto the tracts in Trackvis is much smoother without manual editing of the Trackvis header!
3) We also released SOURCE CODE!

Please feel free to share your experiences on the NITRC website so that we can keep improving the tool!

P.S.: Max is really awesome to work with and as promised he made the release possible before my summer travels!!

Emotional bases

People take risks all the time at different levels. When people want to take risks in life especially emotional (non-documentable) risks how can they be calculated? To calculate anything we need a base system. The most popular base system currently for arithmetic is decimal system. Binary system is the most efficacious though!

Given my inclination towards computational perspectives in life and above all my faith in spirituality I think that the most efficacious base system for calculating risks in emotional adventures is {S,B,F}: S-your soul, B-your body, F-your faith. Now as time goes the number of "trits" you use to represent your emotional state keeps increasing (like in a typical decimal/binary system) and everyone's state depends on what kind of arrangement these three values take.

For e.g. One emotional state can be represented as FFSSBFBFS which means that person has his/her faith as the most recent and actually as in numerical systems the highest order values are the left most and in emotional sense the most robust and reliable. For eg. 101 and 102 are similar but 101 and 201 have a large difference. The left most digit plays a huge role.

Now given that to be able to calculate risks involved it is important to start with most reliable and high order values. So always try to begin your adventures before starting to write new emotional states in your life with F,S that way the small fluctuations that happen towards the right side of your emotional state won't matter as much! For e.g. FFSFFFSBFSSBBBB is much more robust (in terms of efficient/stable survival) than BBBSBBFSBSBFFBFFFS. So people who have firm faith in something abstract and are clear in mind about that can try and take risks later on in life and minimize impact as much as possible. That's why cultures try to inculcate faith in children as they grow up. Those left most values value the most and having that perception allows you to calculate or cope with risks involved in emotional adventures.

Depth of a culture

I am notoriously unpopular for my pro-American attitude partly because of my blunt straightforwardness which might be considered extreme. While different people I argue with have different reasons to find faults with American culture some say their culture is not deep and is superficial and materialistic.

See, cultures that are based on or adapt modern science are bound to be like that. In fact the materialism is what separates impulsive judgements from rigor of the reasoning. Sure impulsive judgements might be handy at times but more often than not they are are not dependable with the given size of human population and scale of interaction on the planet.

Older cultures obviously are not based on modern approach to reasoning and tend to associate mysterious depths to understanding of life etc. Thanks to the western influence on the approach of reasoning we have tools to embrace uncertainties in a much better way. Why should we take that embracing uncertainty is a good thing? See, this is based on western influence and western cultures have had to evolve under harsher conditions of life because of climate and landscapes etc. Tropical countries naturally support life without requiring much effort from the human side at least not on the scale needed in colder climates. Well why we do we need to live in harsher climates? Well as I said before the size of human population you know, we can not cram lot of people in one place without dropping the individualistic animal instincts within us. Why do you think western influence resonates with many modulo survival fears!

Embracing uncertainty can seem to be superficial but actually it's deeper on the scale that actually matters for survival. It might seem majority of American export being "service" is superficial but re-think and adjust your views. They know how to run empire at least without repeating mistakes (on a relevant time scale). One can ask why am I so certain about my views. It's mainly because one has to instantiate at a certain level otherwise there won't be any objects of decision and I instantiate (am certain) where there is representation/room for uncertainty.

Obviously America is a big country and I don't have samples of interaction from all of it but from east coast which I believe is the strength of the US in causal terms. Coasts stimulate not just America but most countries on the planet so no big surprise. My experience in the mid-west through Madison also reinforces my hypotheses but I am glad and grateful I experienced east coast first as there are many local optima that can make people get stuck in mid-west type areas.

Steps to install Shogun

Shogun's a huge collection of machine learning tools implemented in C++ and wrapped for MATLAB use. With help of Chris Hinrichs I started using the package for my work in DTI classification. They keep coming up with new version every so often and I needed a lookup place for the set of steps to perform. It is linux based software and it's not as simple as double clicking a setup.exe

So here's the steps assuming you have limited access on the machines:

1. Download the latest release from http://svn.tuebingen.mpg.de/shogun/releases/ (As of today the latest version is 0.9.1)
2. cd download_dir/src
3. ./configure --interfaces=libshogun,libshogunui,matlab --destdir=install_dir --prefix=local -enable-glpk
4. make
5. make install
6. Edit .bash_profile in your $HOME directory to add the following line export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib:install_dirlocal/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
7. In your MATLAB code: addpath('download_dir/src/matlab')

Look into download_dir/examples for examples.

Happy new year

Today marks the beginning of 2010 and a new 10
Approaching the teen years of 21^st century
Makes me both happy and wary
Happy because we seem to be on the road to recovery
Wary because we can't be complacent too early
For the dynamics of our entropy are too hairy

On a personal level I hope
Everyone can at least glance
At romance
For an awesome blissful trance
That can fuel
One to reach your crowning jewel

The journey of romance
Might not all be rosy
Well what else worthy
Can one get without being risky?

At any rate
Here's the poem I wrote
For a new year
Summarizing my newest experiences in the previous year

Refreshing creativity

I found this post on the math prodigy,Terence Tao's, blog. If not for any of the content just the creativity of using English can get attention and trigger some useful empathy. Creative communication is very refreshing to me!

Consistent performance

I have been in the trance of watching a really great movie, Avatar, since last after noon! See I like Hollywood movies for their outpouring risks that show up as variety and quality! I liked Terminator 1 and 2, True Lies, Titanic and have had great opinion for James Cameron. Now after watching Avatar in 3D IMAX I became a life-long fan of James Cameron. All the movies I mentioned have been a "world wide phenomenon" in movies. There is one other James I really admire: James Horner! The score of A Beautiful Mind has a long lasting impression on me and the score of Avatar is excellent!

See producing something great is great but consistency in it is what really impresses me!

CAMINO-TRACKVIS

I have been using CAMINO and TRACKVIS since mid-summer and along the way I built some in-house utilities that I thought should share with DTI researchers. I had written the utilities in C using malloc for memory management but that type of management didn't scale for over million tracts. Then Maxwell Collins suggested to using the "piping management" employed in CAMINO. He then extended and made my code into "releasable format" so in addition to being able to download the utilities package from here, you can also download it from SourceForge and it has been posted to NITRC for review. Below I am pasting the "public description" that I entered while submitting to NITRC.

With increasing efforts on brain connectivity analyses it becomes important to have tools that can allow increased interoperability among different tractography tools. This package allows interoperability between CAMINO and TRACKVIS. CAMINO is a leading software package in DTI processing. The package is from University of College London. TRACKVIS is a tract visualizing utility with capability of visualizing up to and over a million white matter tracts seamlessly. The package is from Massachusetts General Hospital.

The tools in this package allow conversion of tracts from one format to another in a very effective way with ability to handle over a million tracts.

I plan to release some more tools soon.

Military and free market

The two most important (overriding) systemic forces are military and then free market. Free market has some influence on military but the latter overrides in case of a dead lock. There might be (are?) other meta-forces that actually "cause/control" these but these are the objective forces that can be manifested to actually make a difference in the living. It does help to detour (as long as the objective is kept in mind) into some of the spiritualities to have some entanglement effects on the forces but it's hardly replicable or communicable. One has to figure ones own way by honing the empathetical skills which are more or less like theorem proving skills in terms of communicability.

More grease and more

Yesterday I posted a small demo.m. Today I made another small demo.m to convert ROIs in NIFTI format to text files based on a request from my mentor Moo K. Chung, which reminds me also to point to another piece of source code I worked on for Cosine series based representation of white matter tracts.

As I mentioned in my previous post I will soon release CAMINO, TRACKVIS interoperability tools.

Switching gears

I posted a few times based on my encounters in brain image analysis at the Waisman center. Today I wanted to post a sample demo script on reading output from DTI_TK in MATLAB. Then I realized I will wrap the demo script in a meta post about how important it is to be able to switch gears (if one wants to reduce overhead in interdisciplinary research) not only in terms of conceptualizations but simple things like being able to use multiple platforms and software packages. Since I joined Waisman, I got more comfortable with MAC, LINUX etc. I am no longer just a WINDOWS person although I still cannot trade WINDOWS for any other platform. I plan to release some tools for CAMINO TRACKVIS interoperability as well.

See, all research in interdisciplinary at some level and needs ability to switch gears but applied research just has higher demand (for doing noticeable (even locally) research) on the gears and needs sufficient investments in greasing it properly. I worked on projects in collaboration with Psychology departments before while I was at Temple. I interacted with "psychologists" working on computer vision problems. There the research is aimed at hypothesizing human perception based on Gestalt psychology (and here's the kicker) eventually leading to machines with perception. While working with psychologists in neuroscience like Kim the results should eventually lead to interpretations of human behavior for clinical purposes. Both these objective functions have quite different properties!

Most of my palpable research experience has been in coming up with heuristics motivated by Gestalt principles and apply blackbox methods from simulation based statistics, specifically particle filters for perceptual grouping and robot mapping problems. More lately I have been working with passionate young Assistant Professor,Vikas Singh whose interests are actually in applying and analyzing techniques from optimization theory and machine learning. This is opening up a lot of opportunities for me to actually start think and work on actually analyzing the efficiency/complexity of heuristics. I am seriously hoping to build some skills in "smoothed analysis". Then I need to be able to switch gears from thinking like complexity analyst, to psychologists, to being software engineer (one of my key skill-strengths). Anyways I will blog more specifics on that when I have some real progress in that line. Without further wrapping I will present what I originally intended to present that is a simple demo script to read output from DTI_TK in MATLAB.

You can download the package from here and run demo.m. I am not explaining the details because what I am offering is possible grease into the gear of DTI processing (to save some annoyance) not building the gear. The actual gear itself can be built pretty nicely using the documentation on the DTI_TK website itself.

Estimating empathy

This post has been on the "Set of possible upcoming posts" for over an year now. I have been wanting to write this post since last election campaign. I just had become a big fan of Obama and his stress for inclusive politics to improve the way DC operates the US (and the world :). Then I joined Waisman center whose mission coincidentally focuses on foundations of life, developmental disorders and Neurodegenerative disorders. A few goals essentially are about "understanding" psychological disorders and especially empathy deficits that can produce dysfunctional families!! Obama had mentioned about empathy deficits in Washington while people at Waisman focus more on a social, personal level. Obviously there's empathy involved at many levels of human life.

The main reason I wanted to write about empathy was that although mentions empathy many times in his speeches and which underlies his inclusive attitude, rarely did he say how others can acquire that skill. If you think about it you quickly realize that empathy is the most basic psychological quality (instinct) that creates any value in the society! Think about stock markets, music, movies, any art for that matter, even intelligence, quest for survival etc. So it makes sense to attempt to quantify such an important quality keeping such a scale of human civilization functioning so that there are guidelines for people to try to acquire such ability in an effective way. As Scott always says the meat of non-trivial reasoning is typically in quantifying, since it captures the complexity of the task without taking about trivial (im)possibilities in the rationale-extremes.

So what tools can we rely on! My favorite is obviously computational. As I mentioned before too the notion of computation is really unifying many spheres of knowledge since it tries to model the though process of human beings that underlies every sphere of knowledge. Its impact on all fields is so insuppressibly real that if there is no impact of computer science on a field then its realisticness can be questionable! Studying emotions like empathy and qualities like intelligence are a tricky thing. But as long as we have end goals for these computational thinking can help ask real questions. A few successful examples are the quest for artificial intelligence and computational game theory which ties up computer science and economics which helps design good societal games to keep the society stimulated in a healthy way. Hence for psychologists to ask truly relevant questions about empathy or other types of emotions its important to be able to take the machinist approach.

For e.g. we can rely on tools from interactive proofs (IP) where we can convince others of the truth of the statements using some communication protocols. The IP class is very powerful that means there are lot of things can in theory be communicated with others in effect creating empathy. Of course finding the protocols itself might be exponentially hard based on what we want to communicate. Usually experience in survival (survival instinct) seems to be the closest causal reason for intelligence which can be efficiently verified (polynomial time verifiability). Isomorphisms across spheres of knowledge and across time actually indicates that and actually realizing those isomorphisms actually fascinates me and indicates robustness of our human survival instincts.

The key to pick on survival instinct as the cause is the assumption (axiom) that everyone wants to survive. But how do you communicate with those who don't view this axiom like suicide bombers etc.? Well that's why we need some sort of enforcement of axioms otherwise there can be no basis for reasoning. Usually the best way to enforce axioms is to show the benefits of having those axioms like let's say proving non-trivial theorems (consequences) of those axioms and hoping that at least one of the consequences impresses them to fall for the axioms. For e.g. people fall for America for various reasons, like money, liberty, luxuries etc. etc. Empathy can only be verified after achieving it. Actual way of achieving is like coming up with theorems. So estimation of empathy is equivalent to theorem proving which means it's NP-hard! We can only hope to achieve practical approximations assuming P!=NP.

Computer Science in Neuroscience

I got a job basically through a fellowship which wanted to bring in graduates in Computer Science to look at biological problems. For the past 9 months I have been looking at brain image data especially Diffusion Tensor Data trying to do basic processing and also applying classification methods and developing segmentation methods with several collaborators. Because of the channel I was hired through and because of the circle I am spending my working (and social) hours I can clearly see how Neuroscience (and biology in general) can drastically benefit from CS wisdom. It's an intriguing thing that our quest for machines laid the foundation to understand their language which in turn gave a fresh perspective for the foundation of modern science that in turn can help define our understanding of life.

CS wisdom can affect research pace in neuroscience on many many different levels. Just by applying software engineering skills you can grease a lot of processing. Machine learning/data mining/Artificial Intelligence methods can obviously help making sense of the biological sensor data. CS wisdom can help apply blackbox type research style to start making progress. This wisdom is almost always the fundamental tool in complexity theory: we need to start somewhere for the general problem setting and then dig deeper to exploit specific instances of problems as needed. One thing I noticed is that lack of such perspective can hold back lot of progress. Also another wisdom you can get from CS scientists like Umesh Vazirani is to focus on higher order bits. Well as I mentioned in my previous post building bridges for wisdom between CS and Neuroscience is allowing me some good times.

Building bridges

We all want to work in a way we like and these likes evolve over time based on amount of success (positive feedback) one has in it. Typically in an academic career path one has to build either a combination of consulting + research or teaching + research. Teaching + research is a bit harder path and typically requires shiny background like top schools top thesis etc. Consulting + research is more viable for average PhDs (like mine) and not so ivory background. Good thing is transitioning between the two is possible thanks to interdisciplinary and more importantly applied research. It's always nicer to be able to communicate between seemingly unrelated groups of research as it can save lots of redundant efforts. Having strong bridges between spheres of our knowledge makes the knowledge base only stronger. There is lot of opportunity currently in building bridges in research which in my opinion is another crowning impact of Computer Science in terms of actual machines, software and most importantly complexity theory.

Streaks of thought: Streak 26

A while ago I had a post on human rights and money. The point kind of was that our progress can be measured by our affordability of human rights. Well why do we call that progress? It's because it gives more chances to people to spring back from honest mistakes. There might be some abusers of the progress but usually those can be caught. This is because giving second chances to people is inherently rooted in wanting second chances for oneself! It all has to do with estimating empathy in lives. I have been procrastinating to write a post about it. Hopefully I will finish it sometime this year!

Animal analysis

For past two nights I was watching Animal Planet before going to bed (to avoid repeats on CNN). One night I saw "Monsters Inside Me" which showed the dangers of parasites lurking around us. The wilder the environment gets the more danger we run into. The show reminded how our "civilization (= rights + responsibilities)" process was not just for sympathy, empathy in the high-functioning sense but essentially a Darwinian process. We had to cluster around to separate other killers and the purpose of clustering is defeated without civilization because we would kill among ourselves. We still do but we came a long way.

Yesterday I watched "Killing for Living" which showed how in many species many babies are born-murderers and kill their siblings and in some cases parents kill their children etc. for food. Males kill each other and get killed by females for mating etc. The show said "Just because you are their kind doesn't mean they won't kill you!" One particular instance was striking: Typically stags fight almost to death for mating with female deers but one specific sub-species just have an "abstract fight" where they decide who the winner is without touching each other just by making abstract fight moves!! That is an instance of using brain more than bran! We probably evolved from such sub-species of apes who loved being alive more than sex and reproduction! This probably was the first instance of questioning the instincts! Of course now questioning is one of the seed pillars of our civilization!

Sometimes when things in our high-functioning world relationships (both professional and personal) are frustrating such animal knowledge can give good perspectives on how better off we are in the race of evolution. Killings in today's societies are still very marginal (except for extreme cases like Darfur etc. where the population is still behind in civilization) and most of us get food and get to mate without getting killed!!